Date: Oct 2, 2012 2:16 PM
Author: Paul A. Tanner III
Subject: Re: US teachers are overworked and underpaid
On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 12:37 PM, kirby urner <firstname.lastname@example.org> wrote:
> I'm wondering about the huge industry of SAT coaching and so on,
> Kaplan and like that. Certainly Japan must have a vast industry of
> such franchises, given the importance placed on various tests.
Quote: "American teachers spend on average 1,080 hours teaching each year. Across the O.E.C.D., the average is 794 hours on primary education, 709 hours on lower secondary education, and 653 hours on upper secondary education general programs."
As what I cited shows, the average US schoolteacher has to perform roughly 50% more teaching hours per year than the average schoolteacher of the entire OECD.
And let's look at the highest performing countries in the world on international tests:
For the average schoolteacher in Japan, Finland, and Korea, three of the world's highest scoring countries on recent international tests, the number of teaching hours per year are only about 600, 600, and 550 respectively, roughly only half the teaching load of the average American schoolteacher. For France, which scored highest in the world in TIMSS Advanced with a coverage index of roughly 20% when it participated back in 1995, that number is roughly only 620 teaching hours per year.
Question: What do tutoring industries have to do with why these countries and essentially the entire OECD work their schoolteachers less - and even much less - than the US works its schoolteachers in terms of teaching hours per year?